


Learning to lose you

by yunliu



Series: Heart in cheek [2]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Can be read alone, Childhood Friends, F/M, Flashbacks, Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun-centric, M/M, Platonic Cuddling, Self-Reflection, Trans Female Character, based off the poem One Art by Elizabeth Bishop, but id advise you to read the first part for more context
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23225035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunliu/pseuds/yunliu
Summary: To lose Doyoung's joking tone, for her to shed this old skin he's left his imprint on-- he's lost worlds, but it hadn't spelled this big of a disaster.
Relationships: Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Kim Dongyoung | Doyoung
Series: Heart in cheek [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1372909
Comments: 5
Kudos: 21





	Learning to lose you

**Author's Note:**

> literature students rise!!!!! Basically inspired by the poetry I read in class and my own experiences. 
> 
> Would advise you to read wish you were straight for more context

There's just some things that happen to gravitate away from Jaehyun. Like his keys, his earpiece, or his spare change. They simply have this innate destiny, that he can sense down to his bones. He was the reason why his father removed their traditional lock and installed a fingerprint scanner in its place. He just couldn't get a good hold on them. As compared to the past, he's become more responsible and managed to curb the tendency. It still happens, though. 

There was one evening when he couldn't find his keys, before the scanner. The boy had promised to spend the afternoon with Doyoung at the mall, but instead, they spent time outside looking for his stupid metal keys. Inevitably, they didn't go out to see the latest movie. A far better alternative they took up was (yes, another) one of those Harry Potter movie binges on Netflix until around 3'o o'clock in the morning. It was nice to wake up to see Doyoung's restful face, curtains casting shadows above. It was an experience he would cherish every time.

Back in high school, he had joined an arts interest group, and he had a hand at poetry. Of course, he wasn't as good as Yuna or Wonwoo, the most creative of their bunch. Typical, overachiever Doyoung had joined too once he had suggested it to the other.

"What exactly do we write poems about?" Jaehyun mused, fiddling with a pen between his fingers. The older continued eating chips. 

Doyoung thought for a moment. "I don't know," he shrugged. "Maybe you should ask other people, or read a few poetry books." He followed his advice with some interest. 

Yuna wrote about her personal experiences. She didn't want to forget the memorable things, she had said. One notable poem he had read from her was about planting flowers, and how she felt during her first choir solo back as a first year. Jaehyun remembered how bitter Doyoung was when she had entered the club and snagged the solo for Good Friday as a freshman with her deep, resonant voice. 

He thought about writing a poem about seeing Doyoung still sleeping in the morning. But that would be creepy. Friends don't write poems about their friends sleeping. Plus, what was the point of writing about something that was always there? 

"You'll never know when your memories slip away from you." Yuna warned when he shared his opinion. Honestly? It felt as if his sleepovers with Doyoung would be forever: that they would last forever. They had been doing it for so long, it was already a part of their life. His friends joked that the pair lived at each others' houses. 

Wonwoo, on the other hand, wrote a lot about pining after someone. Pining after exactly who, he never knew. It was a stark difference from his impression of him as an aloof person. Jaehyun could emphatise with him. People could name hundreds of poets better than his senior in technique, but his poetry made Jaehyun think about Doyoung instantaneously. Wonwoo's poetry was scarily relatable. The older boy had asked him if he thought of anyone after he read one of his works after seeing his reaction. (He couldn't answer him properly.)

During that time, his grandmother was suffering from the later stages of dementia. She would hold his hand sometimes, mumble a name that wasn't his, but his father's instead. As a child, his grandma promised to go to Italy together when he was older, just the two of them. Now she couldn't even remember how to go to the supermarket she frequented. If his father was home, he would tell him about what he talked about with his grandmother. 

"She called me by your name again today." His father's face was fixedly impassive, not revealing a silver of emotion. The older man stopped visiting her a while after that. 

Who was that? What was that? Perhaps that's why Jaehyun had written so many poems that dealt with the themes of time and memory. Losing faster, faster, until you don't know that you've lost yourself. He became scared of the same happening to him, and cherished his aged items more. 

So many thoughts about remembering, the one thing his grandmother lacked. In his last year of high school, he lost his only memory of his late mother. It came in the form of her shiny silver necklace, with a little heart charm hanging off its sparkling reins. It rarely left his neck, already on before he began to speak. He had passed it to his father when he had a dental check up once, and didn't ask about it until they got home.

He didn't see the necklace again. Just like how his mother died and never came back. At least he had photos of it. If you looked at him, he always had that shining piece of silver hanging around his neck. Jaehyun took down the photo of him with his friends on his desk because it reminded him of the necklace. It was sparkling rather brightly in the harsh flash of the camera. Habitually, he would reach a hand to his neck to fiddle with it. Now all he felt there was skin. 

_________

Blankly, Jaehyun stared off into a corner of the room, feeling dizzy from walking around so much. 

He sat there for some time, before Doyoung walked in, hands empty. No necklace. The older sat himself down next to him. The round of Jaehyun's chin trembled like a child's, and he took in a shuddering breath. "Jae..." The older boy wrapped an arm around his shoulder, bringing him closer next to him. 

Jaehyun pressed his lips together in a tight line, frustrated with the wetness beginning to rise up in his eyes. He reached out his arms to hug Doyoung and rested his head on his shoulder. Then, he properly cried. It felt like his lungs were being stretched out every time he breathed, akin to a newborn baby not used to inhaling on its own. Yet he breathed like he was running out of air. Snot ran down his nose until Jaehyun could almost taste it. The tears couldn't stop falling, one down, one down, one down, an endless pour. Maybe they would go on forever, until his face became a wrinkled prune. 

Doyoung pat the lower half of his back rhythmically, humming a lullaby under his breath. Suddenly, he was seven years old again, crying in Doyoung's arms after finally realising that his mother would really never return. And the grief was coming back like a truck, emotions frozen in time melting away to something cold and raw. 

__

When he reminisced about the incident, all he could remember was Doyoung, his comforting embrace, and how they would spend time with each other. The only memories he has with his father is the one printed photograph of him with his grandmother. The man wasn't even in the photo -- the small part of his finger cut into the corner of the photograph like an ugly stain. 

Once he woke up after a restless sleep, and took to writing down all the numbers on his phone. He didn't have much. Then he marked out a page to write down the addresses of the places he frequented, those that had grown dear to his heart. 

What has he lost? 

He's lost what was left of his mother in that necklace. He's lost a board game about some fantasy land, back in middle school. It was stolen from him when he brought it to level camp. He's lost one of his worlds while playing an RPG game. He's lost his grandmother to old age, the woman who had left him briefly slip into another world every time he visited her: a world away where he could pretend that his father talked to him, where he wasn't failing his mathematics, where he knew what his father were doing on his business trips other than business.

He's lost three worlds, but none has brought disaster. 

The little Lego cities that were built up in his room are gone now. The school he went to in elementary has already been demolished, that one time when he only knew laughter. His grandmother always came with him to the park nearby, and everything in it is gone as well. The park he always went to with his grandmother is gone as well, having been knocked down to make way for a residential area. The library he and Doyoung frequented as children is gone, the one where they used to play hide and seek at. This is normal. But why, why hasn't Jaehyun tried to stop getting so attached to things? 

If he knows they'll always go away, why does Jaehyun still want them to stay?

He missed the way the puzzle pieces would feel just right under his fingers. Jaehyun usually brought one piece to school, sometimes, playing with them secretly during class under his desk as his teacher talked. The parts that linked each other together would seize up in his palm. There was a smell of lemongrass, sweet and bitter, of the classrooms after cleaning-time, the fragrant perfume that the pretty librarian wore every shift, the way Doyoung and Jaehyun would chase each other around the library, muffling their excited shrieks to avoid a scolding. All the while, the librarian cast a blind eye to their antics, as long as they weren't too noisy. One of Doyoung's dirty tactics while playing catch was to surge ahead and to grab the hood of Jaehyun's worn gray hoodie -- he only had one, he only bought clothes when his father told him to -- the zipper snagged constantly, and Doyoung would fix it for him every time. 

Sometimes Jaehyun would go to the park after a long day. He would keep an ear out for the swing creaking under his weight, not strong enough to support a sixteen year old. And his grandmother would watch him so fondly, he realised, as if he was a little boy again, when he played in the playground every afternoon, building sandcastles in the sand pit. 

Conversations strolling in the park with his grandmother were about either the smell of the river, the small fleet of houses nearby. Jaehyun missed it. He spent so much time there, after all, since he was 8, and now he was fully grown. All those days have been blended together into a cohesive, thick chalky paste. To run his hands through the mixture, and to lift it up to examine it: he does not see the fine details anymore, rather, he remembers them by specific moments, no longer by the exact dates. 

There never were, and never will be, anything to mourn over, because this is how it is. The world will change. Nothing will stop it, especially not Jaehyun. 

Even if he keeps the tightest grip on the memories he wants to keep, they will slip away from his grip anyways. Even if he has memories with a certain place, it will change, and then, it is not his place anymore. It is not his place to want for the outcome to be something different. He is no different from anyone else, everybody will lose just like him, it is perfectly normal. The things that do last are few and far between, and Jaehyun thinks, he has come to terms with that truth. 

That is, too, to lose Doyoung. 

It's a Saturday morning when he... no, she told him. Jaehyun, for this first time in a long time, had stayed over. It was when he still had her sweet taste on his tongue. She is a woman. 

Jaehyun has known Doyoung for a long time, way before their puberty years, when she was still scrawny and reeling from the effects from testosterone, after she had grown into her height and become all tall and irresistibly attractive. 

Doyoung had looked him so firmly in the eye, told him, and promptly burst into tears. What else was he supposed to say? Of course he loved her no matter what, and would support her all the way. In actual fact, even if years would have driven them apart, causing them to turn in separate directions, Jaehyun would still love her. Jaehyun is like that. Always holding on, after loving her for so long. 

_He should have seen this coming._

One of his steadiest rocks who he clung onto in the turbulent streams of life, has finally washed over. Doyoung was still the same person, but why was he so distraught?

If only he liked girls. 

(But he would have never been attracted to her before she came out.)

If only he didn't like her, and only loved her as a friend. (She was so kind, so caring, who wouldn't fall in love with her?) 

But, gradually, she slipped into the role of one of his girl-friends, and as she started presenting more and more as a girl, she just became a 'best friend.' No longer was she a good friend with the prospect of something more. He felt terrible for feeling so torn over this. It didn't mean like she was leaving forever. She was still a call away. He could just press a button on her phone, and she would pick up, because she adored him like that. Yet, of the faceless lovers in his dreams, they were always of another strong build, not of a woman. Well, this faceless lover was Doyoung for a while. But she would not be that person for him anymore.

She trusted so much, enough to let him see her wear a dress for the first time. And when she stepped out of the changing room, all blushing and beautiful in a summery white piece, it pained him to not feel his heart flutter, not like how it did when he would see Doyoung in a button down and skinny jeans. Was it alright to feel sad? Is it wrong to feel this way? 

Doyoung still loved him regardless. He was sure of it. It was crushing to realise that he wasn't attracted to her anymore, and since she came out to him, they had one sleepover. He woke up with tears blurring his eyes, although he couldn't remember exactly what he dreamt about. She was always unreachable, a step ahead, a fingertip away... she kept her distance a lot, now. The familiar feeling of her hands ghosting his shoulder and neck when they watched shows on her computer were gone. She chooses to run her hand through in her long hair instead. He missed the way she would wrap her arms around him, so naturally, as if they belonged there, and he would hear her heart rate jump a bit, before slowing, not to betray her. 

He missed her unrestrained, contagious laugh, something he had never thought about before, because he had heard it so often. If he thought about it enough, he would be able to remember... how Doyoung felt on his lips, her cold hands; to be on the receiving end of her warm gaze. 

What does he need to do? How are they supposed to go back to normal when he doesn't even know what normal is? He's wanted to call Doyoung his boyfriend for so long, but this possibility has been extinguished, the fluttery feeling Jaehyun used to have for him is gone. What's left is all in his memory. 

It's funny how you notice things only after they're gone. The feelings you know exist, but find difficult to describe become suddenly tangible once they are lost. They reside only in his memories, only when he takes a walk down that road, pulling it from the trenches, then he can shape this sensation. They are malleable under his hands, form hard and soft, and when he is done putting a definition to it, the mass falls away into forgetance. Then, all he has left is this definition, and with all moments he has left behind: his mind manages to lump together, finally, into something he can hold.

If he thinks about it technically, Jaehyun has mastered the art of losing. Everyday, he loses something, both consciously and unconsciously. His keys, his earpiece, his spare change, _a lover._

Jaehyun can't lie to himself this time. To lose Doyoung's joking tone, for her to shed this old skin he's left his imprint on-- he's lost worlds, but it hadn't spelled this big of a disaster. 

___ 

His finger traces aimless patterns into her back of her shirt. She's been long asleep already. The sound of her breathing is steady at first, then it picks up. Doyoung's dark silhouette flips over. 

The street light from outside the window catches in her eyes, and she is quiet, waiting for him to speak. 

"Tell me. How do we return to normal?" His voice sounds raspy to his own ears, toughened with the edge of sleep. 

She clutches tight onto his shirt. "I'm sorry."

"No, no, don't be sorry. This has always been a part of you." 

"I can't understand why." she murmurs slowly, frustrated. "Then why, is this so devastating to us?"

The sheets rustle as Jaehyun shifts closer to her, and she takes his head under her neck, running a hand through his hair. He leans into the touch, sighing. "Do I miss you? Or do I just miss the feeling of loving you?" 

"Maybe it's both. Don't dwell on it," she replies crossly. "We could have been the cutest couple, now that I think about it."

Jaehyun pauses, frowning. "That doesn't matter. I've been so selfish about this whole thing, Doyoung." 

He reaches out and holds her hand tightly in his. 

"Besides, you still love me, silly. Just not in a romantic way." 

"I'm sorry I can't love you back." The words tumble out before he can stop it. He wants to shut himself up, but he doesn't want to remove his hand from hers. "I wonder. If we had gotten together... it would have hurt more, huh?" 

Though he can't see a thing without light, he can pinpoint the exact moment when she huffs, giving up on trying to answer his question. "There's no need to be sorry! Some things aren't meant to be. Besides, you're here with me. I'll never let go of you, whether a girl or a boy." 

Closing his eyes, he breathes into her embrace, lost in thought. Losing that love is much better than losing her in the first place. He ought to be grateful. 

This time, she leans forward, and he feels a slight pressure on the crown of his head; she kisses it affectionately, and finally, she does it without reservation like how she did when she first told him. 

Really, the art of losing isn't too hard to master. 

**Author's Note:**

> T-T sadness


End file.
